Currents: Trends, People, Projects

Along with the more public debate about the benefits the Semantic Web is - or isn´t - delivering to the Internet, a related undercurrent of discussion is growing about software engineering´s future. In the vanguard of this discussion, some researchers and software engineers are advocating that Semantic Web technologies should be key components of the next paradigm of software development. These advocates, however, are discovering that the ongoing debate about the Semantic Web´s ultimate usefulness is being fought over the user experience - whether or not the principles behind the Semantic Web are just too complex to be truly useful to the bulk of Internet users.